This Tool Helps You Find Copies of Your Images on the Internet

Even if you’re not one to loose sleep over possible image thievery, we’re all at least a little curious to know if copies of our images are floating out there, somewhere unbeknownst to us.

Enter TinEye, a free “reverse image search engine” that lets you submit an image to find out where it came from, how it’s being used, and if modified versions exist. Check out this example image of Kanye West ruining Taylor Swift’s moment at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009:

How does TinEye work? When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature for it, then compares this to every other image in its index to retrieve matches. So far, over 2 billion images have been indexed by TinEye.

TinEye finds exact and altered copies of the images – those that have been cropped, color adjusted, resized, heavily edited, or slightly rotated. When you submit a photo and do a search, you can compare your submitted image with the results side-by-side to highlight any differences.

Note that if you choose not to register with TinEye, which is free, your search images will be discarded after 72 hours.

TinEye is brought to you by Idee Inc., an advanced image recognition and software company. We’re pretty excited about what they’re doing, so we’re pumped to announce that Leila Boujnane, who leads the TinEye team, is speaking at Luminance 2012. Leila will discuss the future of image recognition, and the idea of human vision at machine scale.

Head over to TinEye to see more of what they’re doing, and then check out our 20+ Luminance speakers – there’s sure to be someone you’ve been dying to see.

 

Interested in learning more about Luminance? Get all our ticket and pricing information here.